Through Allen Ginsberg’s Lens: Beat Life in the 1950s

Back in 1953, a little-known poet named Allen Ginsberg purchased a small, second-hand Kodak at a shop on the Bowery.

For the next ten years he used that camera to take portraits of himself and friends Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady, among others.

He partially abandoned photography in 1963, and by then those names and their writings had come to define the Beat Generation.

Now 79 of Ginsberg’s photographs – some of which were taken in New York during that time period – are on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in an exhibit called “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg.” Though the exhibit is in D.C., many of the photographs – hand-captioned in Ginsberg’s cursive – offer a glimpse into the New York lives of the Beats. We see a clean-cut Ginsberg on the roof of his downtown apartment, the New York skyline at his back. We see a professorial-looking Burroughs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, standing next to “a brother sphinx.” And we see Kerouac in Tompkins Square Park making “a Dostoyevsky mad-face.”

Those three photos were all taken in 1953. At the time, Ginsberg was living in an apartment in Alphabet City, then known as the Lower East Side. The rent was just $30 a month, a quarter of the wages he was making as a copyboy. Three years later he published “Howl,” perhaps his best and most enduring piece of writing.